Design Thinking, Marketing, and Unlocking the Power of People

We recently interviewed Lynn Teo, Vice President of Digital Marketing at CA Technologies. It was a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation covering the connections between design thinking, marketing and unlocking the power of people – whether at the level of companies or countries. We will share the insights from our discussions in two blog posts.

About CA Technologies

CA Technologies, with over 10,000 employees, is headquartered in New York, NY, and is traded on the NASDAQ as CA. The company’s mission is to help its customers succeed in a future where every business— from apparel to energy— is being rewritten by software. Lynn mentioned that CA has been in business for over 40 years and has built a trusted reputation among large companies to power the business behind IT – all the way from the data center to the mobile device. The company is known for understanding the intricacies of complexity and scale, while at the same time being able to adapt to the new waves of technological change. Lynn described CA Technologies’ three current areas of focus as DevOps, Security, and Agility.

Background and Career

Lynn grew up in Singapore, which during her formative years was in the process of transforming from a newly independent small island nation into one of the leading global commercial powerhouses. Singapore is renowned for having a very rigorous educational system, which Lynn credits as giving her a strong foundation to build her career upon. She then pursued her graduate education at Carnegie Mellon which had a cutting edge program exploring the intersections of technology, business and design. Thus Lynn feels she got the best of both systems of education: the rigor of Singapore combined with the multidisciplinary design thinking approach of Carnegie Mellon’s program.

Lynn started her career in user experience and the design of software product interfaces, and online instructional materials at Bell Labs. She saw a career pivot to marketing as being quite natural in that, at its core, marketing is also about ensuring a compelling user experience. She said that a particular mentor who was extremely impactful on her career was Debbie Klein, who was Lynn’s career mentor at Sapient. Debbie is now SVP of Client Solutions at FROM, a Digital Agency. She said Debbie helped her navigate across different functions and taught her that a successful leader needs to unlock the potential in others. When people are empowered, the effect is not just linear but potentially exponential, as these people can then spread the benefits to others and a virtuous feedback cycle is created. We reflected too on how Singapore as a nation took a deliberate strategy during those formative decades of investing in IT and STEM education to build a foundation for its success. Its workforce is now among some of the most highly educated in the world. The country’s investments in technology and education have certainly unlocked Singapore’s potential and fueled its advancement exponentially.

Takeaways

Design Thinking

Since “design thinking” played such a large role in Lynn’s career and the way she views marketing, we asked her how she would explain it to a novice. She said that at its core, design thinking is problem solving – understanding what the needs of a person are, and how to solve for those needs. She said some people associate it with aesthetics, but in her view aesthetics still needs to fit within the ultimate goal of solving problems for real people – the form ultimately needs to fulfill function.

The challenge for corporations, she said, is that this is not necessarily a quick process. Since marketing organizations are often measured on the ability to see results quickly, senior leadership needs to ensure that incentive structures they put in place do not unwittingly sabotage this longer term goal of being able to delight customers by solving their needs at a deep level.

Lynn described how CA’s Santa Clara office has setup a “design studio”, where they will bring customers in to give feedback on how features of the CA products help them in their day-to-day work.

Another comment Lynn made in connection with this topic is that: “a brand has to earn the right to be relevant by continuously providing value.” One way she ensures this for the CA digital properties she oversees is to make sure there are always plenty of sources of value for her customers. This could include tech blogs, developer portals with documents and code snippets, and online spaces for the sharing of best practices and forming community in the customer base. Her insights brought to mind a quote by Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley: “Your products run for election every day, and good design is critical to winning the campaign.”

I have sold multi-million dollar enterprise deals to some of the largest companies in the world; managed high volume transactional SaaS teams, developed & managed channel strategies / partners, sold internationally and been through a couple acquisitions. I have not “seen and done it all”, but I have done quite a few things.

Shastri is a writer and consults with several companies in technology marketing and customer success. He has written many articles for the Huffington Post and Washington Post, and is a guest content contributor for Ziff Davis B2B.

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